You've read through what
you've written---your first few scenes, your first
chapter, your completed novel---and you've discovered
that your words don't move you. They don't make you want
to keep reading. They don't make you laugh or cry. If
writing is bleeding on the page, well, you might have
scratched yourself, but you don't need a transfusion. And
you don't know what went wrong.

When you started writing,
did you know what story you were telling? This is
trickier than it sounds. You might have known your
characters, you might have known your world, and you
might have known your plot...but even with this much
planning done, it's entirely possible that you had not
yet located your deep layer, the heart of your story, the
engine that drove you to write it in the first place.

Odds are very good you did
not know your theme.

Your theme is nothing more
and nothing less than the heart of a novel. It is not a
grade-school exercise in tedium, that single droning
sentence you wrote that told your reader what you were
going to tell him. In a novel, your theme is a living,
vibrant, critical thing. It is your particular passion in
this particular novel summed up in a handful of words. It
is what you need to say.

Need. That's the critical
thing in a theme. If you're writing novels, if you are
doing something this complex and challenging, you're
doing it because something in you needs to write. You
have something to express, some particular point of view,
some set of life experiences, some driven hunger that you
must put down on paper. You NEED. And you need to say
what you need.

Maybe it is: In spite of
having survived heartbreak, I believe in true love. Or: I
believe good can triumph over greater evil. Or: If I were
King of Everything, this is the way the world would be.

Your plot is the map of
your story. Your theme is the map of your soul, and it is
where your characters will find their direction, their
flaws, their hungers, and their own passions. They only
breathe with your breath, and they only bleed with your
blood. Your plot may be Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl,
Boy Gets Girl, but your theme---your take on the world
based on your life, your own hopes and aspirations, your
own beliefs---might be Chubby Bald Guy Deserves the Love
of a Wonderful Woman.

You have themes in you.
You've built them from love and courage, but you've built
them from anger and fear, too. You live with them every
day, when you're muttering that argument you had with
your spouse or colleague, designing better comebacks;
when you're watching the boss cheat someone and you're
getting furious about it; when you're watching a disaster
and telling yourself, Someone could have prevented that;
when you're hearing the latest political garbage and
thinking, This is not the way the world should be.

I could do this better. I
WOULD do this better.

And so you write.

You have rich, powerful,
compelling, passionate themes boiling inside you. You
have something worth saying. Now you just need to know
how to figure out what it is, and how to get it on the
page.

About the Author:
Full-time novelist Holly Lisle has published more than
thirty novels with major publishers. Her next novel, THE
RUBY KEY, (Orchard Books) will be on shelves May 1st. You
can receive her free writing newsletter, Holly Lisle's
Writing Updates at http://hollylisle.com/newsletter.html